With over 500 million users, the decisions that Facebook makes about its privacy settings have the potential to influence many people. While its changes in this domain have often prompted privacy advocates and news media to critique the company, Facebook has continued to attract more users to its service. This raises a question about whether or not Facebook’s changes in privacy approaches matter and, if so, to whom. This paper examines the attitudes and practices of a cohort of 18– and 19–year–olds surveyed in 2009 and again in 2010 about Facebook’s privacy settings. Our results challenge widespread assumptions that youth do not care about and are not engaged with navigating privacy. We find that, while not universal, modifications to privacy settings have increased during a year in which Facebook’s approach to privacy was hotly contested. We also find that both frequency and type of Facebook use as well as Internet skill are correlated with making modifications to privacy settings. In contrast, we observe few gender differences in how young adults approach their Facebook privacy settings, which is notable given that gender differences exist in so many other domains online. We discuss the possible reasons for our findings and their implications.

On 8 January 2010, Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg made the following statement: “People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.” (M. Kirkpatrick, 2010). Thus began another wave of concern about Facebook’s attitudes toward their users’ privacy. The above comment came on the heels of Facebook’s move in December 2009 prompting users to reconsider their privacy settings (Zuckerberg, 2009). Users were presented with a message that asked them to alter their privacy settings. The default option was to make user content publicly accessible to all Facebook users and anyone else who had enough technical savvy to access the data using the tools that Facebook made available to software developers. This change outraged many privacy advocates and regulators (Albanesius, 2010; Electronic Privacy Information Center, 2010; Opsahl, 2010), particularly given that Facebook had just settled a class action lawsuit over privacy issues concerning a feature they had introduced a few years earlier called Beacon (, 2009).

With the role social media plays in the lives of Millennials, more than half (51 percent) feel that social media posts influence their own travel planning choices. Three in ten Americans of all age groups admit their travel planning choices are somewhat or very influenced by social media posts. Despite the prevalence of social media influencers working with destinations and brands, these respondents are still most influenced by posts of friends and family (63 percent), over posts from media and news organizations (11 percent), users they do not know personally (nine percent) or brands (eight percent).

Half (49 percent) of Americans say Facebook is the social media platform that most inspires them to travel, followed by Instagram (35 percent), Pinterest (19 percent), Twitter (13 percent) and Snapchat (13 percent). More than a third (34 percent) say that social media platforms do not inspire them to travel. Women are more likely to be inspired by Pinterest (25 percent of woman compared to 12 percent of men) and men by Twitter (20 percent of men compared to seven percent of women).

“Social media changes the way we live, work, play and of course, travel. As millennials continue to lead trends, it will be interesting to see if social deception becomes a more common and even acceptable activity when portraying vacations to friends, family and followers,” says
Dan Durazo
, director of communications, Allianz Global Assistance
USA
. “Whether you plan to make your vacation look better than it was or not, the right travel insurance policy can protect you from the unexpected things that may go wrong – and your social media followers will never need to know that the trip wasn’t as perfect as it looked on Instagram.”

Allianz Global Assistance offers travel insurance** through most major U.S. airlines, leading travel agents, online travel agencies, other travel suppliers and directly to consumers. For more information on Allianz Global Assistance and the policies offered for travelers, please visit:
http://www.allianztravelinsurance.com
.

*Methodology:
These are findings of an Ipsos poll conducted on behalf of Allianz Global Assistance.
For this survey, a sample of 1,005 Americans from the Ipsos I-Say panel was interviewed from
May 2
– 5, 2018. The precision of online polls is measured using a credibility interval. In this case, the results are accurate to within +/- 3.5 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, of what the results would have been had all American adults been polled.
Quota sampling and weighting were employed in order to balance demographics and ensure that the sample’s composition reflects that of the actual U.S. population, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
Credibility intervals are wider among subsets of the population.

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Compiling it with compile-file works okay with
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and fails with
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: